“If you call, I’ll treat us to the best bottle of wine you’ve tasted.”
“French?”
Josh winced. “Californian.”
Kathleen gave an exaggerated shudder. “What a life you must have led. But you’re right, of course. Let’s do this.” She sat up a little straighter. “Martha. Make that call.”
She held tightly to Josh’s hand as Martha dialed, and held her breath as Martha spoke to someone on the other end of the phone.
There was a long pause during which Kathleen’s chest ached and she concluded that her ability to handle intense emotion hadn’t improved with age.
Finally, Martha handed her the phone. Her eyes glistened.
“It’s Ruth. She can’t wait to talk to you.”
Kathleen took the phone, wishing she’d asked Josh and Martha to leave her alone to talk to her old friend, but they must have known instinctively that was what she wanted because Josh stood up and gave her shoulder a squeeze and Martha gave her a kiss on the cheek and whispered that they’d be “right outside.”
As the door clicked quietly shut behind them, Kathleen was left alone.
Her hand was shaking so much she could hardly hold the phone to her ear.
“Hello? Is that you, Ruth?”
21
MARTHA
GRAND CANYON
“I don’t like leaving her.” Martha and Josh had driven the two and a half hours to Peach Springs, leaving Kathleen asleep in the gorgeous rustic lodge with its views across the Grand Canyon.
She’d assured Martha that she could happily spend a month admiring the view from her suite, and that spending a day alone would be a pleasure not a hardship, but still Martha felt unsettled.
How was it possible that she’d grown fond of Kathleen so quickly? It was partly the circumstances—being closeted together in a car—partly because she reminded Martha a little of her grandmother, but mostly because Kathleen had given her back her confidence.
She no longer doubted her ability behind the wheel of the car. Instead, she looked forward to the driving. She’d stopped punishing herself for past decisions. Thanks to Kathleen, she’d stopped thinking of them as bad decisions. They were her decisions, and if her family didn’t approve that was their problem.
But this morning she’d felt torn between her fondness for Kathleen, and her desire to do something to help Josh.
“I know she’s worried about meeting Ruth. I had a feeling she would have liked Liza to be there.” They’d put the top down and Josh tugged his hat down to shade his eyes from the hot Arizona sun.
“Ask her to fly out?”
“Not an option. She has family of her own. They’re going to France.”
“Then we’ll go with Kathleen to Ruth’s. If she looks as if she wishes she’d made a different decision, we’ll drag her out of there and take her for a walk on the beach instead. Or we can take her home.”
“Home?”
“My place. I live up the coast from Santa Monica. I have a great view of the ocean from my deck.”
She had an unsettling vision of him sprawled on the deck wearing nothing but board shorts. Her imagination had always been her downfall and now it was presenting her with vivid images of Josh naked. She tried to switch it off and replace it with less provocative images of Josh hunched over a computer screen, looking serious. But that didn’t work because he didn’t hunch and although he often looked serious, when he smiled it was as if someone had switched on all the lights full beam.
“You live near the sea?” Her voice sounded strange and she cleared her throat. “I thought you hated water?” She wasn’t going to think about him emerging from the ocean, with droplets of water clinging to those broad shoulders.
“I like looking at it. Not experiencing it.”
“So if I was drowning, you wouldn’t save me?”